After reading the stimulating exchange between Chris Drain and Siyaves Azeri, I wanted to reply to Drain from a slightly different angle. Drain’s latest response takes aim at what Vygotsky calls his general genetic law of development, which Drain suggests should be updated through an appreciation of Tomasello and Searle’s concept of “joint intentionality”. At the heart of Vygotsky’s thought is the claim that “every function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice, in two planes, (...) first, the social, then the psychological, first between people as an intermental category, then within the child as an intramental category”. Drain takes Vygotsky to derive this from Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic”. Drain appears to follow Alexandre Kojève’s influential interpretation of Hegel, as picked up by continental philosophers like Sartre, in which the dialectic is treated as an allegory about social antagonism. As continental thought turned against Hegel and Marx, this reading was retained and Hegel himself was associated with social subordination. As a starting point for my response, I would note that Vygotsky and Hegel are not offering a social critique here: they are making a more basic point about the process of determination as such. Radical liberal constructivist critiques of Vygotsky of the kind offered by Jones and Stetsenko follow continental philosophy and critical theory in ignoring the constructive side of Hegelian negation and recognition. (shrink)

نظریۀ «مرگِ خدا» مشهورترین نظریۀ نیچه است. در این مقاله می‌کوشیم کارکردهای ایدۀ مرگِ خدا نزد نیچه را در سه سطح تحلیل کنیم. سطح نخست ، سطح ابتدایی بحث‌های هستی‌شناختی و اعتقادی دربارۀ وجود یا عدم وجود خدا؛ سطح دوم ، شادمانیِ الحادی از فقدان خدا؛ و سطح سوم ، میراث قاتلان. در پایان نیز به این پرسش می‌پردازیم که آیا نیچه از مرگ خدا سرخوش است یا بر آن سوگواری می‌کند؟ با توجه به این که نیچه در آثار مختلفش (...) رویکردهای مختلفی به مسئلۀ «مرگِ خدا» اتخاذ کرده است، تلاش خواهد شد تا، بدون توجه به تقدم و تاخر این آثار، تفسیری از موضع نیچه در مقام «یک کل» ارائه شود که در آثار مختلف، به فراخور بحث، لایه‌های مختلفی از این ایده را مطرح کرده است. در این میان سه قطعۀ بسیار کلیدی‌ از سه کتاب راه‌برندۀ تفسیر ما هستند: نخست انسانی زیاده‌انسانی، دوم چنین گفت زرتشت، و سوم علم شادمانه. در نهایت، از منظری انتقادی نشان داده می‌شود که نظریه‌ی «مرگ خدا»ی نیچه نه رویکردی هستی‌شناختی یا باوری اعتقادی بلکه بیانگر وضعیتی فرهنگی است. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI draw connections between Hegel’s concepts of recognition and morality and demonstrate how they are compatible with an ethic of care. I explore Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and demonstrate the rol...

Mit diesem Aufsatz soll ein Beitrag zur Klärung von Nietzsches Humanitätsverständnis in binnenrelationaler Perspektive geleistet werden. Dabei wird in drei Schritten vorgegangen: Der erste Schritt setzt an den kritischen Vorzeichen von Nietzsches Humanitätsverständnis an. Hierbei geht es um die Skizzierung der kritischen Verfahren der genealogischen Kritik und des Perspektivismus. In einem zweiten Schritt soll sodann aufgezeigt werden, worin bei Nietzsche die genealogische Kritik ihren Halt findet, damit nicht jeglicher Wert destruiert wird. Dabei soll die binnenrelationale Perspektive des Individuums in der (...) Dimension der existentiellen Selbstanerkennung freigelegt werden. Trotz aller Emphase des Individuums bei Nietzsche geht es ihm stets um die Verbindung von Partikularem und Allgemeinem im Lebenszusammenhang. Diese Dimensionen kann der Mensch in seiner Binnenrelationalität selbst abwiegen. Nietzsches Verständnis des Selbst kann für ihn vor dem Hintergrund seines Anerkennungsverständnisses keinen essentialistischen Wesenskern beinhalten; das Selbst entwickelt sich für Nietzsche ursprünglich durch die sozialen Bezüge im Lebensvollzug: Es geht somit um die praktische Dimension, die immer schon relational verschränkt ist. In einem dritten Schritt soll Nietzsches Humanitätsverständnis als existentielle Selbstbeschreibung des Menschen herausgearbeitet werden. Indem Nietzsches kritische Vorzeichen berücksichtigt werden, zeigt sich, dass sich seine Kritik zentral auf ein bloß tradiertes Humanitätsverständnis richtet. Worauf es ihm dagegen ankommt, ist sein Verständnis des Individuums als „freier Geist“, der von sich aus in der Lage ist, sein Leben selbst in die Hand zu nehmen. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to see whether desire for recognition might contain an emancipatory aspect. Could this desire be a political ally? The argumentative strategy is to fully acknowledge the oppressive mechanisms at work before trying to find a way to other outcomes, including emancipation, with which desire for recognition has been associated in the tradition from Hegel. Through a re-interpretation of the master-and-slave dialectic, supplemented by sociological research on status expectations, I suggest a way out of the (...) vicious circle, where desire produced by power finds satisfaction through a preexisting other, resulting in an endless dynamic of compulsive conformity and regressive assertion of status. The hold of this dynamic must not be underestimated, yet, as I argue, both desire and what satisfies desire are liable to change, through struggle. The transformation of the generalized other, which provides recognition, is seen to be a crucial feature of all collective struggle. The very source of recognition is transformed, behind the backs of the actors, in turn affecting their desire. This can but must not lead to the emancipatory outcomes which are traditionally tied to recognition in the Hegelian tradition. (shrink)

Is tragedy, as Nietzsche declared, dead? In recent years many philosophers have reconsidered tragedy's relation to philosophy. While tragedy is deemed to contain important lessons for philosophy, there is a consensus that it remains a thing of the past. This article calls this consensus into question, arguing that it reifies tragedy, keeping tragedy at arm's length. With the interest of identifying the necessity of tragedy to philosophy, it draws from Quentin Skinner to put forward an alternative approach to genre as (...) living form. This approach alters our understanding of the philosopher at the heart of philosophy's dialogue with tragedy, Immanuel Kant. Moreover, it shows that tragedy is closer to contemporary philosophy than we might think. (shrink)

In Freedom's Right Axel Honneth seeks to provide a theory of justice by appropriating Hegel's account of ethical substance in the Philosophy of Right, but he wants to do so without endorsing Hegel's more robust idealist commitments. I argue that this project can only succeed if Honneth can offer an alternative, comparatively robust demonstration of the rationality and normative coherence of existing social institutions. I contend that the grounds Honneth provides for this claim are insufficient for his purposes. In particular, (...) I argue that Honneth's claim that “justice and individual self-determination are mutually referential,” even were it to be accepted, would be insufficient to underwrite his more robust identification between the normative foundations of justice, autonomy and reciprocal self-realization. In the final section of the paper, I turn to Honneth's analysis of the “social institution” of friendship, which he, following Hegel, holds up as a paradigmatic instantiation of social freedom understood as, in Hegel's words, “being with oneself in another” . I argue that an analysis of the normative import of friendship wholly in terms of mutual recognition misses an important aspect of the kind of self-realization that friendship makes possible. (shrink)

A widely debated question in current research centres on determining the precursors to G. W. F. Hegel's theory of recognition. Until now Fichte, Rousseau and Aristotle have been discussed. However, the present paper analyses a further surprising correspondence between Marsilio Ficino's theory of love and Hegel's theory of recognition. Here it is shown that Hegel studied Ficino in 1793 and that we can discover syntactical, semantical, and structural vestiges of Ficino's De amore II 8 in Hegel's early fragments on religion (...) (1793) and love (1797), which are closely related to the general theory of recognition found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Not only may this thesis be relevant for Hegel or Ficino scholarship, but it could also be a further indication that social theories with normative content are an integral characteristic of (early) modern self-consciousness. (shrink)

A number of contemporary authors (e.g., Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, and John Caputo) claim that Hegel’s Religionsphilosophie provides important insights for contemporary philosophy of religion. John Caputo argues that Hegel’s notion of incarnation as radical kenosis is a powerful tool for postmodern Radical Theology. In this essay, I scrutinize this claim by balancing Hegel’s notion of incarnation with his notion of recognition—the latter of which Caputo removes from a “headless Hegelianism.” I argue that a non-Hegelian, non-dialectic sense of recognition ought (...) to be introduced in contemporary philosophy of religion to remove the confrontation with the Other from the realm of radical trauma. (shrink)

_Critical essays on Hegel's views concerning the relationship between religion and politics._.

Modern honor appears to be distinguished by two contradictory impulses, a neglect or even disdain of honor, and an ambition to elevate and promote it as dignity, self-esteem, and recognition. The article argues that these tensions can be traced to a foundational difference regarding the political importance of the passion of honor, evident in the seminal and contending formulations by Machiavelli and Hobbes. In recovering and articulating the bases of these competing modern conceptions of honor and tracing the influence of (...) their divergent trajectories, the article seeks to show the importance of honor for understanding contemporary politics. (shrink)